Google Invests Massively in IaaS and Decreases Prices

Earlier this week, Google announced a significant increase in its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offer with an increase in the number of virtual machine sizes available to the US and Europe customers from 4 to 40.

In addition to the new types of instances, the company reduced the price of its Google Compute Engine service by about 5% and decreased the price of its Google Cloud Storage at 20%. In a blog post, Google also launched a beta program that provides storage of limited availability for customers with up to 30% off, but without a service level agreement.

The European customers using the Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and Google Compute Engine can now able to deploy their applications, data, and virtual machines in the European data center, which will increase the performance of data processing while reducing the cross-border circulation of traffic.

These actions are signs of a stroke by the cloud provider looking to deliver the lowest cost and the widest range of cloud services and types of instances to clients. Amazon Web Services, for example, last month announced the price reduction of their number 21 IaaS products since the company launched the service in 2006. AWS continues its geographic expansion and added an Australian region on its cloud services that are already available in Europe, South America and the east and west coasts of the United States.

The types of instances of Google Compute Engine (GCE) now range from a solo virtual core with 3.75 GB of memory and 420 GB of local disk with a price of $ 0.138 per hour in the United States until an instance of eight cores virtual includes 30 GB of memory and up to 2X 1770 GB of local disk space, a diskless option that comes at a cost of $ 1.104 per hour. Google also reduced the price of its four original instance types in 5%.

For comparison, instances types of Amazon Web Services (AWS) start from $0.065 per hour for 1.7 GB memory and 160 GB of storage with a Linux-based virtual machine with one core and go to court with 16 cores.

The announcement is the first significant expansion of Google IaaS service with new types of instances including large memory, high CPU and diskless configurations. Google has been developing slowly but surely its cloud strategy. The company originally launched an application development platform called Google App Engine, adding IaaS computing and storage options this year. Microsoft has taken the same path with Azure, which was originally released as PaaS and then added an IaaS component.